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The Northern Land of Yothra

I decided to start a new map using one of the GIMP tutorials. The main continent, Yothra, is centered at the North Pole of its planet. The map takes up the entire northern hemisphere, so the edges are somewhere near the equator. I have no idea what kind of cultures or stories could go with this map, it's pretty much all just random.

Landmasses shapes are ok and interesting. Graphically, you should, I think:
•*add some kind of texture and/or colour variation to the land and the ocean
• use a more subtle stroke for coastlines
• vary the appearance of mountains (and possibly have a little less of them) and work on blending them better with plains
•*do without the "blurring" that afflicts some parts of the map but no other (why?)
•*remove the white "mist" under the text, you could also do with a much smaller size, it would better convey the vastness of the geography (there is no scale, but since there are three oceans in the map, I guess it is at least an Africa sized continent).

Thank you so much. The continent is about Asia or Africa sized, and I used the large font because I was afraid it would get too pixelated if I shrunk it down. But I can definitely make the font smaller. As for having a lot of mountains, that kind of happened by accident and I didn't feel like changing it. I know that I should change it, but I've already gotten used to the geography being this way. I've built rivers, roads, and towns around the shape of the mountains, so altering the mountains would mean pretty much starting over. But that's not a bad thing, since making maps is so much fun! I really appreciate your help.

Learn about GIMP's layer masks, they are really handy when you want non-destructive transparency in a layer.

The mountains are pretty strong everywhere, you don't need to get rid of them, but you could try to create some variations in elevation at the edges: layer masks can help with that, because a translucent relief mountain looks lower than an opaque one.

A simple way to create a white outline around text in GIMP:

There's a tool called Select By Color (fourth button), use that to select text that is black (on a specific layer), this gives you an outline selection of that text. In the menu, use Select > Grow to grow that selection outwards by X pixels (1 or 2 should be fine). A quick way to fill a selection or layer with colour is to just drag and drop from from the color indicator into the selection, and bob's your uncle.